'My last three novels, they were all about the same thing: the reunion in death of two lovers," says Tim Krabbé. Then he adds, with a rueful smile: "It's not a very light theme." But dark is what Krabbé does. In his fiction, at least. In person, he is a warm, engaging 60-year-old Dutchman: balding, with dark, bushy eyebrows, but tanned and physically vigorous. From his general demeanour you would think he had hit upon a way of bottling enthusiasm. Yet those of his novels published in English - The Cave, The Rider and now The Vanishing - have a contrastingly noirish sensibility, suggesting a brooding, melancholic imagination. The germ of a story, as in The Vanishing, might come from a newspaper clipping, but precisely where the wellspring of his fiction is to be found, Krabbé is not eager to speculate about.

"I'm always trying to stay naive about what's going on. I try only to be concerned with telling the story," he says. "If it's good, the depth will come all by itself."

Krabbé firmly resists the pigeonhole of thriller or mystery writer and rightly so, for the literary finish and philosophical flavour of his work transcend the expectation-fulfilling formulae of genre fiction. He occupies similar literary territory to another recently reappraised writer, Patricia Highsmith. Like hers, his stories are tightly plotted, with strong characters and acute observation of social mores and individual psychology. But Krabbé's also have a more European, existentialist sense of the absurd - as if his characters dimly perceive themselves as victims of some bleak cosmic joke.

Krabbé's renaissance here is thanks largely to his publisher, Bloomsbury, which has teamed him with a gifted new translator, Sam Garrett, who has just won an award for doing full justice to Krabbé's lean, precise prose. To say that he was already one of Holland's best-known authors nevertheless sounds a little lame: to damn him with faint praise, perhaps. Given the context of an English linguistic imperialism that sees hundreds of British authors translated into Dutch every year, however, Krabbé's achievement as one of his country's few literary exports is considerable.

If Krabbé's name had any currency in the UK before now, it was as the author of the novel on which the films The Vanishing were based. "Films" plural because Krabbé's uncanny tale of a young woman's disappearance from a motorway service station and her boyfriend's obsessive search for her was adapted for the screen twice: first, in 1988, in a modest but memorable Dutch production, originally titled Spoorloos, that made a sufficient impression at the festivals to be dubbed in English and internationally distributed; then, in 1993, as a Hollywood remake, which - despite a promising cast including Jeff Bridges, Kiefer Sutherland and Sandra Bullock, and the same director - was "not so good", as Krabbé readily, if sardonically, observes.

Yet the book for which Krabbé is most renowned in his native Netherlands is De Renner, which came out in the UK last year as The Rider, a semi-autobiographical account of a bicycle race. Cycling is one of Krabbé's great enthusiasms. Though he came to it late, in his 30s, he became a keen amateur racer. Already a cult hit among the cycling cognoscenti here, The Rider has been so successful in Holland that last year, on the 25th anniversary of its Dutch publication, fans inaugurated a semi-competitive cycling tour through the south-west region of France that forms the backdrop to Krabbé's fictional race.

"Suffering always appealed to me - it's the essence of cycling," he explains. "When I was eight or nine, I loved running against my friends. I had an image of myself as able to endure physical strain."

As a boy, Krabbé was a good distance-runner and a keen footballer, as was his younger brother, despite being born into a highly artistic family. His father, like his father before him, was a painter - albeit not a very successful one. His parents divorced, unusually for the mid-50s, and his mother supported the family with her work as a children's author and translator who specialised in subtitling films. Thirteen at the time, Krabbé recalls his main emotion as "relief" - his relationship with his father was never an easy one, though he concedes that "he influenced me enormously". Somewhat bizarrely, his father, who was "aggressively non-conformist", stayed on in the family home, even after he had remarried. He is still alive and painting at 95; his mother died last year.

Krabbé grew up reading the novels of John O'Hara, Vladimir Nabokov and Graham Greene among others (he now admires Paul Auster), and knew that he wanted to be a writer early on, recalling, "the moment I decided, when I was 14". He published articles in his school magazine and has supported himself through his writing, living modestly, ever since.

Another possible career route at one time was his other great passion: chess. "When I was 18, I dreamed of being a pro chess player," he says. As a young man in Amsterdam, he came close, dropping out of his degree in psychology. He reached the top 20 in Holland, but never the top 10: "I wasn't talented enough." It is one of Krabbé's traits - whether discussing the film version of The Vanishing or his merits as a chess player or cyclist - to be almost brutally realistic about his status. Perhaps there, in spite of his beguiling warmth and humour, you catch a glimpse of the novelist's cool, objectifying gaze.

A degree of ruthlessness is what you need as a cyclist and a chess player, of course, but Krabbé insists that, in both, it is as much the aesthetic dimension as the competitive one that compels him. He runs his own chess website, and composing problems - exercising what he calls "artistic chess" - still occupies much of his time. "It's like the joy you might feel at solving a mathematical puzzle: there might be some hidden, paradoxical, beautiful theme in there. I am very susceptible to this beauty."

So it is scarcely surprising that reviewers have often noted the spare, elegant architecture of his storytelling. "I often use it [composing chess problems] as a metaphor for writing, because when you're really in your book, nothing else matters. The beauty and force of what you're expressing is all you're interested in," he says, animatedly. "Truman Capote called it 'the secretary phenomenon' - as if the book were being dictated to you."

Krabbé presently has a busy few months ahead of him. His next novel, entitled Detours, has yet to finish being dictated to him. And he is getting married, for the second time, to Bernadette, a secondary-school teacher with a seven-year-old daughter. Krabbé has a 16-year-old son by his first wife: "It was not a good marriage," he says, but has proved a better friendship. In the meantime, Sam Garrett is busy translating two of Krabbé's books that are already published in Dutch: Delayed and Kathy's Daughter. The latter, says Krabbé, "is a very autobiographical story about a love affair with the daughter of someone I'd had a great love affair with when I was 19".

As ever, patterns and symmetries please him. Is this not, after all, another take on his "reunion of two lovers" theme? Not in death this time, perhaps. But, with Krabbé, you can be sure it won't be "light".